by John Buchan
‘I am almost at the end of my story. Two months later, George became a figure of national importance. It was he who chiefly broke up the Coalition at the Grafton House meeting, and thereby, I suppose, saved his party. His speech, you remember, clove through subtleties and irrelevances with the simple declaration that he could not work with what he could not trust, and unless things changed, must go out of public life. That was Reggie’s manner, you know - pure Reggie. Then came the general election and the new Government, and George, very much to people’s surprise, refused Cabinet office. The reason he gave was that on grounds of principle he had taken a chief part in wrecking the late Ministry, and he felt he could not allow himself to benefit personally by his action. We all thought him high-minded, if finical and quixotic, but the ordinary man liked it —— it was a welcome change from the old gang of arrivistes. But it was not the real reason. I found that in the diary.’
Sir Arthur stopped, and there was a silence while he seemed to be fumbling for words.
‘Here we are walking on the edge of great mysteries,’ he continued. ‘The reason why he refused the Prime Minister’s offer was Reggie... Somehow the vital force in that subconscious world of his was ebbing... I cannot explain how, but Reggie was moving away from what we call realities and was beckoning him to follow... The Grafton House speech was George’s last public utterance. Few people saw him after that, for he rarely attended the House. I saw him several times in Gloucestershire... Was he happy? Yes, I should say utterly happy, but too detached, too peaceful, as if he had done with the cares of his world... I think I guessed what was happening, when he told me that he had consented to the cenotaph in the churchyard. He took a good deal of pains about it, too, and chose an inscription, which his maiden aunts thought irreligious. It was Virgil’s “Tendebant manus ripoe ulterioris amore”... He withdrew his objection to the memoir, too, and Tollett got to work, but he gave him no help — it was as if he had lost interest... It is an odd thing to say, but I have been waiting for the news which was in last week’s paper.’
‘You don’t mean that he engineered the motor smash?’ Lamancha asked.
‘Oh no,’ said Sir Arthur gently. ‘As I said, we are treading on the brink of great mysteries. Say that it was predestined, fore-ordained, decreed by the Master of Assembly... I know that it had to be. If you join hands with the dead they will pull you over the stream.’
Ship to Tarshish
Pall Mall Magazine, 1927
Now the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh... But Jonah... found a ship going to Tarshish: so he paid the fare thereof, and went down into it, to go with them unto Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.
Jonah I. i-iii
THE TALK ONE evening turned on the metaphysics of courage. It is a subject which most men are a little shy of discussing. They will heartily applaud a friend’s pluck, but it is curious how rarely they will label a man a coward. Perhaps the reason is that we are all odd mixtures of strength and weakness, brave in certain things, timid in others; and since each is apt to remember his private funks more vividly than the things about which he is bold, we are chary about dogmatising.
Lamancha propounded the thesis that everybody had a yellow streak in them. We all, he said, at times shirk unpleasant duties, and invent an honourable explanation, which we know to be a lie.
Sandy Arbuthnot observed that the most temerarious deeds were often done by people who had begun by funking, and then, in the shame of the rebound, did a good deal more than those who had no qualms. ‘The man who says I go not, and afterwards repents and goes, generally travels the devil of a long way.’
‘Like Jonah,’ said Lamancha, ‘who didn’t like the job allotted him, and took ship to Tarshish to get away from it, and then repented and went like a raging lion to Nineveh.’
Collatt, who had been a sailor and one of the Q-boat heroes in the war, demurred. ‘I wonder if Nineveh was as unpleasant as the whale’s belly,’ he said. Then he told us a story in illustration, not as one would have expected, out of his wild sea memories, but from his experience in the City, where he was now a bill-broker.
I got to know Jim Hallward first when he had just come down from the University. He was a tall, slim, fair-haired lad, with a soft voice and the kind of manners which make the ordinary man feel a lout. Eton and Christ Church had polished him till he fairly glistened. His clothes were sober works of art, and he was the cleanest thing you ever saw — always seemed to have just shaved and bathed after a couple of hours’ hard exercise. We all liked him, for he was a companionable soul and had no frills, but in the City he was about as useless as a lily in a quickset hedge. Somebody called him an ‘apolaustic epicene’, which sounded accurate, though I don’t know what the words mean. He used to come down to business about eleven o’clock and leave at four — earlier in summer, when he played polo at Hurlingham.
This lotus-eating existence lasted for two years. His father was the head of Hallwards, the merchant-bankers who had been in existence since before the Napoleonic wars. It was an old-fashioned private firm with a tremendous reputation, but for some years it had been dropping a little out of the front rank. It had very few of the big issues, and, though reckoned as solid as the Bank of England, it had hardly kept pace with new developments. But just about the time Jim came down from Oxford his father seemed to get a new lease of life. Hallwards suddenly became ultra-progressive, took in a new manager from one of the big joint-stock banks, and launched out into business which before it would not have touched with the end of a barge-pole. I fancy the old man wanted to pull up the firm before he died, so as to leave a good thing to his only child.
In this new activity Jim can’t have been of much use. His other engagements did not leave him a great deal of time to master the complicated affairs of a house like Hallwards. He spoke of his City connection with a certain distaste. The set he had got into were mostly eldest sons with political ambitions, and if Jim had any serious inclination it was towards Parliament, which he proposed to enter in a year or two. For the rest he played polo, and hunted, and did a little steeplechasing, and danced assiduously. Dancing was about the only thing he did really well, for he was only a moderate horseman and his politics were not to be taken seriously. So he was the complete flâneur, agreeable, popular, beautifully mannered, highly ornamental, and the most useless creature on earth. You see, he had slacked at school, and had just scraped through college, and had never done a real piece of work in his life.
In the autumn of 192 — , whispers began to circulate about Hallwards. It seemed that they were doing a very risky class of business, and people shrugged their shoulders. But no one was prepared for the almighty crash which came at the beginning of the New Year. The firm had been trying to get control of a colonial railway, and for this purpose was quietly buying up the ordinary stock. But an American group, with unlimited capital, was out on the same tack, and the result was that the price was forced up, and Hallwards were foolish enough to go on buying. They borrowed up to the limit of their capacity, and called a halt too late. If the thing had been known in time the City might have made an effort to keep the famous old firm on its legs, but it all came like a thunderclap. Hallwards went down, the American group got their railway stock at a knockout price, and old Mr Hallward, who had been ailing for some months, had a stroke of paralysis and died.
I was desperately sorry for Jim. The foundations of his world were upset, and he hadn’t a notion what to do about it. You see, he didn’t know the rudiments of the business, and couldn’t be made to understand it. He went about in a dream, with staring, unseeing eyes, like a puzzled child. At first he screwed himself up to a sort of effort. He had many friends who would help, he thought, and he made various suggestions, all of a bottomless futility. Very soon he found that his Mayfair popularity was no sort of asset to him. He must have realised that people were beginning to turn a colder eye on a pauper than on an eligible young man, and his overtures wer
e probably met with curt refusals. Anyhow, in a week he had given up hope. He felt himself a criminal and behaved as such. He saw nobody but his solicitors, and when he met a friend in the street he turned and ran. A perfectly unreasonable sense of disgrace took possession of him, and there was a moment when I was afraid he might put an end to himself.
This went on for the better part of a month, while I and one or two others were trying to save something from the smash. We put up a fund and bought some of the wreckage, with the idea of getting together a little company to nurse it. It was important to do something, for though Jim was an only child and his mother was dead, there were various elderly female relatives who had their incomes from Hallwards. The firm had been much respected and old Hallward had been popular, and Jim had no enemies. There is a good deal of camaraderie in the City, and a lot of us were willing to combine and keep Jim going. We were all ready to help him, if he would only sit down and put his back into the job.
But that was just what Jim would not do. He had got a horror of the City, and felt a pariah whenever he met anybody who knew about the crash. He had eyes like a hunted hare’s, and one couldn’t get any sense out of him. I don’t think he minded the change in his comforts — the end of polo and hunting and politics, and the prospect of cheap lodgings and long office hours. I believe he welcomed all that as a kind of atonement. It was the disgrace of the thing that came between him and his sleep. He knew only enough of the City to have picked up a wrong notion of its standards, and imagined that everybody was pointing a finger at him as a fool, and possibly a crook.
It was very little use reasoning with him. I pointed out that the right thing for him to do was to shoulder the burden and retrieve his father’s credit. He laughed bitterly.
‘Much good I’d be at that,’ he said. ‘You know I’m a baby in business, though you’re too polite to tell me so.’
‘You can have a try,’ I said. ‘We’ll all lend you a hand.’
It was no use. References to his father and the firm’s ancient prestige and his old great-aunts only made him shiver. You could see that his misery made him blind to argument. Then I began to lose my temper. I told him that it was his duty as a man to face the music. I asked him what else he proposed to do.
He said he meant to go to Canada and start life anew. He would probably change his name. I got out of patience with his silliness.
‘You’re offered a chance here to make good,’ I told him. ‘In Canada you’ll have to find your chance, and how in God’s name are you going to do it? You haven’t been bred the right way to succeed in the Dominions. You’ll probably starve.’
‘Quite likely,’ was his dismal answer. ‘I’ll make my book for that. I don’t mind anything so long as I’m in a place where nobody knows me.’
‘Remember, you are running away,’ I said, ‘running away from what I consider your plain duty. You can’t expect to win out if you begin by funking.’
‘I know — I know,’ he wailed. ‘I am a coward.’
I said no more, for when a man is willing to admit that he is a coward his nerves have got the better of his reason.
Well, the upshot was that Jim sailed for Canada with a little short of two hundred pounds in his pocket — what was left of his last allowance. He could have had plenty of introductions, but he wouldn’t take them. He seemed to be determined to bury himself, and I daresay, too, he got a morbid satisfaction out of discomfort. He had still the absurd notion of disgrace, and felt that any handicap he laid on himself was a kind of atonement.
He reached Montreal in the filthy weeks when the spring thaw begins — the worst sample of weather to be found on the globe. Jim had not procured any special outfit, and he landed with a kit consisting of two smart tweed suits, a suit of flannels, riding breeches and knickerbockers — the remnants of his London wardrobe. It wasn’t quite the rig for a poor man to go looking for a job in. He had travelled steerage, and, as might have been expected from one in his condition, had not made friends, but he had struck up a tepid acquaintanceship with an Irishman who was employed in a lumber business. The fellow was friendly, and was struck by Jim’s obvious air of education and good-breeding, so, when he heard that he wanted work, he suggested that a clerkship might be got in his firm.
Jim applied, and was taken on as the clerk in charge of timber-cutting rights in Eastern Quebec. The work was purely mechanical, and simply meant keeping a record of numbered lots, checking them off on the map, and filling in the details in the register as they came to hand. But it required accuracy and strict attention, and Jim had little of either. Besides, he wrote the vile fist which is the special privilege of our public schools. He held down the job for a fortnight and then was fired.
He had found cheap lodgings in a boarding-house down east, and trudged the two miles in the slush to his office. His fellow-lodgers were willing enough to be friendly - clerks and shop-boys and typists and newspaper reporters most of them. Jim wasn’t a snob, but he was rapidly becoming a hermit, for all his nerves were exposed and he shrank from his fellows. His shyness was considered English swank, and the others invented nicknames for him and sniggered when he appeared. Luckily he was too miserable to pay much attention. He had no interest in their games, their visits to the movies and to cheap dance-halls, and their precocious sweethearting. He could not get the hang of their knowing commercial jargon. They set him down as a snob, and he shrank from them as barbarians.
But there was one lodger, a sub-editor on a paper which I shall call the Evening Hawk, who saw a little farther than the rest. He realised that Jim was an educated man — a ‘scholar’ he called it, and he managed to get part of his confidence. So when Jim lost his lumber job he was offered a billet on the Hawk. There was no superfluity of men of his type in local journalism, and the editor thought it might give tone to his paper to have someone on the staff who could write decent English and keep them from making howlers about Europe. The Hawk was a lively, up-to-date production, very much Americanised in its traditions and its literary style, but it had just acquired some political influence and it hankered after more.
But Jim was no sort of success in journalism. He was tried out in a variety of jobs — as reporter, special correspondent, sub-editor — but he failed to give satisfaction in any. To begin with he had no news-sense. Not many things interested him in his present frame of mind, and he had no notion what would interest the Hawk’s readers. He couldn’t compose snappy headlines, and it made him sick to try. His writing was no doubt a great deal more correct than that of his colleagues, but it was dull as ditch-water. To add to everything else he was desperately casual. It was not that he meant to be slack, but that he had no stimulus to make him concentrate his attention, and he was about the worst sub-editor, I fancy, in the history of the press.
Summer came, and sleet and icy winds gave place to dust and heat. Jim tramped the grilling streets, one vast ache of homesickness. He had to stick to his tweeds, for his flannel suit had got lost in his journeys between boarding-houses, and, as he mopped his brow in the airless newspaper rooms smelling of printers’ ink and shaken by the great presses, he thought of green lawns at Hurlingham, and cool backwaters of the Isis, and clipped yew hedges in old gardens, and a pleasant club window overlooking St James’s Street. He hungered for fresh air, but when on a Sunday morning he went for a long walk, he found no pleasure in the adjacent countryside. It all seemed dusty and tousled and unhomely. He wasn’t complaining, for it seemed to him part of a rightful expiation, but he was very lonely and miserable.
I have said that he had landed with a couple of hundred pounds, and this he had managed to keep pretty well intact. One day at a quick-luncheon counter he got into talk with a man called McNee, a Manitoban who had fought in the war, and knew something about horses. McNee, like Jim, did not take happily to town life, and was very sick of his job with an automobile company, and looking about for a better. There was not much in common between the two men, except a dislike of Montreal, for I picture Mc
Nee as a rough diamond, an active enterprising fellow meant by Providence for a backwoodsman. He had heard of a big dam somewhere down in the Gaspé district, which was being constructed in connection with a pulp scheme. He knew one of the foremen, and believed that money might be made by anyone who could put up a little capital and run a store in the construction camp. He told Jim that it was a fine wild country with plenty of game in the woods, and that, besides making money easily, a storekeeper could have a white man’s life. But every bit of a thousand dollars capital would be needed, and he could only lay his hands on a couple of hundred. To Jim in his stuffy lodging-house the scheme offered a blessed escape. He wanted to make money, he wanted fresh air and trees and running water, for your Englishman, though town-bred, always hankers after the country. So he gave up his job on the Hawk, just when it was about to give him up, and started out with McNee.
